Tag: Plastic Free

Home-made Bubble Mix Recipe for Long-Lasting, Super-Strong Bubbles

Our home-made bubble mix recipe comes in two flavours – quick and easy for bubbles ‘now, now, now!’, or (with just a few extra ingredients) frankly brilliant for the biggest, strongest, longest-lasting bubbles you’ve ever seen! Together with our diy giant bubble wands, this bubble solution will help the kids make enormous bubbles all day long for some unforgettable summer fun. Read on to get the recipe!

It’s kid’s play to make giant bubbles with our home-made bubble mix recipe and wands!

An Earth Day Art Activity

For this year’s Earth Day, we used our new environmentally-friendly eco glitter, sent to us by the lovely people at Eco Glitter Fun, to make these super-sparkly lino printed fishes. Read on to see how we did it and to find out more about our Earth-friendly sparkles!

Earth-friendly art for Earth Day!

All-Natural Toys, Tools and Accessories for Play Dough

In our efforts to go plastic-free, we took a hard look at one of our favourite activities to see what it would take to have plastic-free play dough play-time. It turns out this is so easy to do – We’ve found all sorts of alternatives to plastic right here in our own home, as well as out in the garden, and it is amazing what you can find in charity shops or thrift stores once you start looking. Replacing our mountain of plastic play dough stuff with an all-natural kit was really easy, and what we’ve got now is far more open ended and even more fun to play with! So read on to see how we play with play dough without without a single bit of plastic…

Playing with play dough needn’t mean getting out a pile of plastic toys!

Do your kids love having little picnics with their toys? Mine do, but what they don’t love so much is tidying away, and those little bits of teeny tiny doll food often go astray. So instead of buying them more, why not try out our quick and easy DIY solution? All you need is a bottle of wine and some paint…

Make a lovely play picnic for your child’s toys – all out of wine corks!

Have you heard of Maileg? Maileg (pronounced “My’lye”) are an award-winning Danish toy company that produces gorgeous, swoon-worthy soft toys with a nostalgic, storybook appeal. We’ve been ogling them for quite a while, so we were beyond thrilled to receive a parcel the other day containing a beautiful Maileg ‘Big Sister’ Mouse, complete with matchbox bed, that was kindly sent to us for review by One Hundred Toys. If it’s possible to create Hygge in toy form, a Maileg Mouse must be it! Read on to find out why.

We love leaf painting! Use natural materials like leaves, sticks and stones as the canvas for your kids’ artwork!

Painting is a great activity for young children. It’s a fantastic work-out for their imagination, and helps them practice their fine motor skills, as well as helping to develop their understanding of colour, shape, texture and viscosity (yes, wet paint WILL drip onto the floor/your clothes/the dog’s dinner…). We do a lot of painting in our house, and love finding different things to paint – after all, flat paper can be SO last earlier-this-morning. We try to bring natural materials into our play at every opportunity, and painting is the perfect thing for this as its easy to find natural objects to decorate. Stones, sticks, pinecones, shells… you name it, we’ve painted it. Leaf painting is an absolute favourite, though, and something that we do all the time – read on to find out why!

There are images of some amazing mud kitchens out there on the web, and it’s very easy to fall down a rabbit hole of great ideas without actually ever making one for your child. I was certainly guilty of it, until one day my sister stopped by and interrupted my description of the great mud kitchen I was going to make (one day), by pulling together a few things lying around in the garden and making one in about thirty seconds! My kids have been playing with it ever since (we’re talking for years now!), and though I still dream and plan of a more beautiful and robust solution, they’re out there having fun today – and they really couldn’t care less that it’s not perfect.

So read on to see what you need to make a mud kitchen right now, and I guarantee that you’ll have enough stuff already to get your kids playing today!

Mud kitchens are great for kids so get them playing dirty today!

If you’ve read ‘The Bog Baby’ by Jeanne Willis and Gwen Millward, you’ll know that bog babies are round and blue, with goggly eyes, spiky tails and ears like a mouse, and their wings are no bigger than daisy petals. This magical book is perfect for inspiring creative model making and small world play, while at the same time gently encouraging children to explore what it means for a thing to be wild and free. Read on to find out how to make a home-made play dough bog baby kit with our play dough recipe and basic craft accessories – not only are they great fun, they also make fantastic and original gifts when given with a copy of the book!

A magical story about two children who find a mysterious wild creature, ‘The Bog Baby’ is perfect inspiration for creative play!

Our kids love cooking up meals in their play kitchen, and one of their greatest pleasures is mixing up the ingredients. We’ve had great fun stocking their kitchen with all sorts of little bits and pieces that can be stirred in a mini cooking pan with a handful of other things; pompoms for meatballs; soy sauce fish containers for, er, fish; strands of wool for spaghetti, and so on. I’m always on the lookout for new things to include! The other day I had an absolute brainwave, and came up with this easy-peasy, quick, and essentially FREE way to make these fabulous play-food sliced mushrooms. Want to make some DIY play food too? Read on!

Make the kids some sliced mushrooms for their mud kitchen, out of just a handful of wine corks!